1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of computer software and, more specifically, to
2. Description of Related Art
Globally, industry is experiencing significant pressure to operate at increasingly higher speeds. Financial markets have a lower tolerance for mistakes or missed opportunities, penalizing companies with large losses in market capitalization and increased costs of capital. Organizations, facing powerful forces such as global competition, the Internet, and customer demand for continuous product and service availability, are required to effectively manage global operations on a round-the-clock basis. This market landscape is characterized by unprecedented volatility and a decreasing organizational life expectancy. The average lifetime of a company in the S&P 500 has fallen from approximately 65 years in the 1930s to approximately 20 years in the 1990s, with the trend projected to continue downward.
Thus, Companies, long focused on functional optimization, now understand that they must optimize enterprise outcomes. This external focus may come at the expense of de-tuning highly optimized internal business silos, but the increased enterprise results will more than make up for any inefficiencies created.
The focus on employees is changing as well. Attempts to accelerate current employee processes by providing more and faster information are leading to information overload and employee burnout. New approaches to how employees work and how they work together are needed to drive the next level of employee productivity. Workforce management and providing an organizational environment for integration is now a required core competency.
The focus on “value-chains” expands to embrace “value-nets” and optimizing the company's processes with immediate suppliers is giving way to a longer view of creating visibility for all members of the network.
The largest change is the focus on change itself. Change moves from something that occurs at irregular intervals to something that occurs continuously. Change becomes integrated into the very fabric of the organization and the ability to capitalize on that change becomes the most critical capability demonstrated by those that thrive in the Innovation Economy.
Customer expectations are also changing. Customers are demanding that businesses change to accommodate their needs, not that they change to accommodate the company's way of working. This shift to customer-centric products and services is quickly becoming a mandate, not an option.
Those companies who are agile will always be offering their customers the best possible products and services. Customers are now able to seed and feed the best solutions where switching costs are minimized. New business models are required every three years whereas this used to be a 10 year cycle. Product life cycles have shortened to six months or less.
Customers are expecting proactive interaction—“bring me the best option/price/capability rather than making me go looking for it” is the requirement of the day. Customers are expecting “local service levels” from global service providers. “You know what I want, you guide my decisions, and you take care of me as an individual customer, not just as one embedded in millions.”
To cope with these forces, organizations must become more agile. The reality, however, is that many are built on rigid Information Technology (IT) systems originally designed to optimize functional silos, resulting in inefficient, fragmented business processes and significant delay in accessing critical information. Thus, there is a need for enterprise systems that are more flexible and adaptable, enabling organizations to access the right information at the right time to drive the right decisions. Therefore, there it would be desirable to have a method, system, and computer program product for quantitatively assessing organizational adaptability.